By Lydia Barley
Photography is an essential part of content marketing. As mentioned in our last blog post how to make your content visually appealing and relevant for your audience making your content visually appealing with images is extremely important in creating engaging and easy to read content. Quicksprout found that content with relevant images get 94% more views than content without images. This shows that not only are images crucial for creating great content, but they also help draw people in to your content.
So by now you might be freaking out, especially if your business doesn’t naturally engage in photography and have the tools and skills necessary to create appealing images. You have no need to fear however as there’s a growing number of websites that provide free stock photos popping up all over Google. In this blog post we will share some of the best. All of which can provide your business with stunning images (not corny stock images of people in suits waving at the camera with a cheesy grin!).
1. StockSnap
URL: https://stocksnap.io/
StockSnap brings together high quality images from a huge pool of submissions. Making them available for downloading, copying, modifying and distributing for both personal and commercial use for free, without asking for the photographers permission. StockSnap has a tag based category system allowing you to search for ‘keywords’ that describe the image you are after. Your search can be as broad as ‘happy’ to as specific as ‘dachshund puppy in the snow’.
2. Pexels
URL: https://www.pexels.com/
Pexels, similarly to StockSnap provides high quality photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license, allowing users to download, copy, modify and distribute the images provided for both personal and commercial uses. Pexel have a broad range of photos, with over 40 000 free stock photos. Every month Pexel add a minimum of 3000 high resolution photos to their collection. Pexel also has a tag based category system where users can search for relevant images by putting a keyword into the search bar.
3. Unsplash
URL: https://unsplash.com/
Unsplash has one of the largest collection of images with over 300 000 high resolution photos. These photos are provided by a community of photographers from around the world. Unsplash continues to add to it’s collection of images each day, with thousands more photos being added each day. With that many photos, it’s highly likely that Unsplash has the image that you’re hunting for! Users can scroll through the new photos for the day or they can use Unsplash’s search feature if they know exactly what they are searching for. All of Unsplash’s images can be used for both commercial and personal use without providing attribute to photographers.
4. Burst
URL: https://burst.shopify.com/
Burst is another free stock photo website, however burst is powered by popular ecommerce platform, Shopify. Burst’s range consists of thousands of high resolution images, taken by a community of photographers from all over the world. Just like all of the other platforms discussed, Burst provides all photos free for both personal and commercial use with no photographer attribution required. Burst categorizes it’s images into themes such as ‘coffee’, ‘fitness’ and ‘fashion’. In addition to these themes, users can search for the image they are after in the search bar provided. Burst will pick up on the keywords you use and find relevant images.
By now you should feel more relaxed and ready to begin gathering a collection of images for your content. There are an abundance of free stock photo websites out there (that aren’t all cheesy!), we simply discussed 4 of the most popular. With both a strong content marketing strategy and SEO strategy you’re on your way to business success.
Are you looking for assistance with your content marketing or SEO? Ignite Search can help! Contact us today.
